Surviving The Assault on Private Sector Careers in America

Become A Cost Cutting Crusader

Okay, back (home) in Massachusetts. The Sox are on a roll and the Celtics just need to remember how to win on the road again; life is good!

That is unless you’re working for a company that’s feeling the pinch of the tightening economy…

Actually, we’re not yet in a true recession (and hopefully we’ll dodge that bullet) but the R-Word is all over the news and that’s bound to cause top executives to switch gears and cut back on company spending. You need to keep your antenna up for this early warning sign of things to come.

Up until now, the people with big, bold ideas have been getting all of the spotlight. When times are good, executives look for ideas that help grow the company and risk takers get a lot of positive attention. But when the future gets uncertain, it’s like the giant RISK switch got turned to AVOIDANCE and those bold ideas that are being promoted by your aggressive coworkers suddenly look careless.

If you’re one of the first to see this switch turn and you change your behavior accordingly, you can create a nice career opportunity for yourself.

Here are a few suggestions to consider:

Start With Yourself: Think of ways you can personally save the company money. If your job involves travel cutting out excessive travel is an obvious suggestion, but it’s a flawed idea because it assumes that there is a large amount of unnecessary travel occurring in the company. From my experience this is seldom true.

Rather than stay home, look for ways to reduce the costs on the trips you have to take. Fly discount airlines, consider staying over on a Saturday night to get a leisure fare, use priceline.com or hotwire.com to get cheap car and hotel rates, stay with a friend, and avoid expensive meals.

Help Your Department: Does your boss have weekly staff meetings? Bake muffins or cookies at home and bring them to the meetings. Look around for ways to make a personal contribution to cut departmental costs. Departments spend a lot of money at quarterly off-site meetings. Imagine you were spending your own money and then makes suggestions on how to save money. We once had a meeting where we had people bring the food. We broke people into teams and gave them $20/team to buy ingredients and had a contest to see who came up with the best recipe. It was a lot of fun and saved big bucks.

Look For BIG Company Efficiency: Every company has a half a dozen cost drains built into the way they do business. In most cases, these are things that cross the lines of multiple departments and have probably been done the same way for a long time. Physical processes that could become digital are usually big hitters.

Once you’ve nailed a couple of these, you need be very careful about how you promote your crusade. No one likes a coworker that toots his own horn. The trick is to offer to share your ideas and then earn your Cost Cutting Crusader reputation one person at a time.

Although these general themes work well, the best ideas are the ones that you create on your own based on what’s actually happening inside your company.

Finally, I need to pass along a word of caution about becoming a Cost Cutting Crusader. You can easily standout as a leader when the economy is down, but you need to keep an eye out for when things turnaround (as the ALWAYS do). One day your executive management will want to start taking risks again in the name of growth and you need to make sure you’re not the last one to switch gears, or your career may be left in the dust.